The Secret of the Glass

by Morin, Donna Russo

  Sophia had never encountered a resident of a fratellanza, the inelegant male boarding houses where sons discouraged from marrying went to live, devoting their lives to government and diplomacy. With no wives or families to return home to after a long day’s work, these men filled Venice at night, finding their release and relaxation in the brothels and gambling houses, the dens of pleasure found on every calle, every fondamenta. At first glance it was a glamorous, carefree life; on deeper inspection it was a sad and hollow existence.

  “You do not seem too disappointed.” Sophia searched his features for the base emotion behind the banal expression.

  “Ah, but there you are wrong.” Teodoro turned back to look her squarely in the face, all pretext gone, cast out to the sea before them. “I am greatly disappointed. I know these rich nobles can be quite insufferable at times, but I would gladly surrender my manners to be one of them, to live their life of affluence and luxury.”

  Sophia answered his stare with her own. His naked honesty bewildered her. If sincere, he was an enigma, a conundrum amid a race of men who fought so ferociously for their veneer of virility. How strong must this man be to so blatantly flaunt his own flaws? She couldn’t look away from him, couldn’t break the bond his confession had created between them.

  Teodoro’s sad eyes creased with a hint of satisfaction.

  “But enough whining. I am a lucky man to serve under Doge Donato. It was perhaps the greatest moment of my life to be one of the forty-one to elect him.”

  She willingly allowed him the shift. “I thought the entire Council elected our Doge?”

  Sophia possessed no more than a superficial knowledge of her government’s inner workings; she knew little more than the laws binding her own life and those of all glassmakers, but thought it imprudent to mention them at this moment.

  “Are you telling me that you don’t know the ingenious method by which we elect our ruler?”

  Teodoro’s mocked distress made Sophia laugh and she shook her head with a giggle.

  “Then it will be my pleasure to enlighten you.”

  Teodoro pushed off the balcony they both leaned on, to stand upright before her, a student about to recite his lessons.

  “You must remember that Venice’s greatest fear is for one person, one family, to gain absolute power, sì?”

  Sophia nodded, already amused by his tutorial manner. Not for a moment did she wonder if Pasquale searched for her; not for a moment did she care.

  “Bene. Then we begin. On election day, the youngest member of the signoria, the inner council, prays in the Basilica at dawn’s first light. After his prayers, he steps out the door and stops the first young boy he sees. He takes this youngster, now called the ballatino, to this very chamber.” Teodoro gestured through the window they stood before and into the Grand Council Chamber. “In attendance are all the members of the Maggior Consiglio under the age of thirty, for a man must be older than that to become Il Serenissimo. All their names, hundreds of them, are put on slips of paper. The ballatino then picks thirty names from an urn. Those thirty men are reduced to nine and those nine vote; the first forty men among them with seven nominations continue. Are you with me?”

  “Yes,” Sophia said. “And those are the men to choose the Doge?”

  Teodoro released a bark of laughter.

  “Not hardly. Those forty are reduced to twelve by drawing, those twelve vote and the first twenty-five receiving nine votes continue. Then these twenty-five are reduced to nine, again by drawing.”

  “And they decide the Doge?” Sophia asked as Teodoro paused for a large gulp of air. She hoped his tutelage continued; she took great pleasure in listening. His voice was like warm, thick cream.

  He waggled a finger at her and she laughed.

  “Don’t get impatient. Those nine vote and the first forty-five with seven votes each continue. From these men, the ballatino draws eleven names.”

  “You’re making this up,” Sophia said amidst their laughter, a comically quizzical expression twisting her features.

  Teodoro shook his head, struggling to catch his breath between his laughter and his lecture.

  “These eleven men now vote and the first forty-one of them to each receive seven votes, remain.” Teodoro paused dramatically, throwing up his arms with a flourish. “These forty-one men, if they are still awake, elect the Doge.”

  The new acquaintances fell against each other, weak with laughter. As their mirth subsided, they separated, unmindful of their familiar behavior.

  Sophia tutted, a hand hugging her cheek in disbelief.

  “How do you get anything done?”

  Teodoro huffed.

  “Luckily all other decisions are made with a little less convolution, though not much.”

  Sophia studied him, his serene, enchanting smile, and those eyes that held her so rapt in their thrall. Who was this man that amused her so? A veritable stranger with whom she shared a kinship, as if their spirits had already met long ago. Her thoughts frightened her; she twitched her glance away with reluctance and stared through the window into the Sala del Maggior Consiglio. The dancing had begun and the resplendently attired couples flashed across the pane, a whirlwind of color and opulence as they executed the leaps and twists of il canario.

  “So you pride yourself as a lawmaker?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Teodoro answered with sincerity. “I do.”

  “Then explain this to me, sir. Are not the nobility under the rule of the sumptuary laws?”

  Teodoro followed her stare and saw what she did, the lavish clothes, the large jewelry, the piles of gourmet food and an embarrassed, crooked smirk formed on his lips.

  The Venetian government believed wealth led to luxury, luxury to idleness, and idleness to inertia. The sumptuary laws attempted to curb all excesses by the wealthy, but it was a relative restraint in a land that prided itself on possessing the best of everything. What, by outsiders, was considered ostentation was the everyday standard of life within the boundaries of the Serenissima.

  Teodoro saw the incongruity as clearly as she did; he nodded with a sardonic smile and answered with blatant honesty. “Yes, they are.”

  Sophia and Teodoro laughed together once more, a conspiring gentle laughter at the nobles’ expense. It drew them together, the poor noble and the wealthy commoner, both out of place in the glittering world, and united them.

  Thirteen

  The emerald silk gown lay draped in a glimmering heap across the chair in the corner, forgotten and eagerly abandoned. Clad once more in her simple gray muslin work dress, Sophia wore her own skin again as well and found strength and purpose in the familiarity. She held the ferro tenderly yet masterfully in her hand, held the molten material at the perfect angle over the fire. Deep in the hub of the flames, she glimpsed the hot, intense blue heart, and in the blue, she saw his eyes.

  So much of the night she had pushed from her memory, so much of the pain and embarrassment she had endured she had discarded like mental refuse, refusing to dwell on it or to feel it again. She had found Pasquale later in the night, when Teodoro had reluctantly begged her leave and she had reluctantly given it. He had taken her hand again in parting, their gaze meeting with an undeniable crash. The essence of his light touch still tingled upon her skin.

  Pasquale had not questioned her, on what she had done all evening or whom she had done it with, and Sophia didn’t offer. The opposite of love was not hate, as she had once thought, but complete indifference, and she found she shared his apathy. Her future husband had returned her to his servant, who saw her returned home, with little more than a grunt of goodbye, and she had dismissed him as easily as he had her. But thoughts of Teodoro she could not relinquish and in truth, had no desire to. She finished the pieces for Galileo, working her magic while memories of the night’s enchantment played over and over again in her mind’s eye. She recalled distinctly not only every detail of how the engaging and exciting young man looked, but how he had looked at her. His gaze w
as an embrace, one that warmed and excited her, and she willingly stepped into it with every thought of him.

  “Phie?”

  The whispered call broke her reverie but she turned to the door with unfettered joy.

  “Papà? Is that you?” She peered into the small gap of the partially opened aperture.

  The wooden portal swung wide and Zeno stood within the embrasure.

  “Are you working? May I come in?” He spoke timidly but it was his voice, her papà’s voice, clear and free from any of his demons, and Sophia was thankful to hear it.

  “Of course, Papà, of course.”

  He descended the twisting stairs and approached her shyly. Zeno took one step into the room and stopped. Lifting his head a smidge, he tilted his long, slightly curved nose higher into the air. His nostrils quivered, his eyes closed in ecstasy as he inhaled the burning wood and heated metal. It was the aroma of his life and that of his ancestors; he had been away from it for far too long.

  Resting the rod upon the table, Sophia spun toward her father, enfolding him with a powerful embrace. It had been many a day since she had seen her papà though she’d spent time with him every day, he had not been himself for a while, and she had missed him dearly. Like loved ones separated for a time, they stared at each other with the tenderness of reunion. The physician had said Zeno would not remember his lost days, his bouts of confusion and delusion, but he would be aware that life was no longer the same.

  “What are you working on, cara mia?” He smiled affectionately at her from beneath the white, wiry hairs of his mustache.

  Sophia retrieved her father’s favorite stool from the corner and placed it beside the furnace, within arm’s reach, while she continued her work.

  “They are the pieces for Signore Galileo. I am on the last one.”

  Her father’s eyes flew open.

  “That’s right, the professore. What a miracle it was to see him here yesterday, right here in my own factory.”

  Sophia smiled; there was no reason to tell him the visit had occurred days ago.

  “Show me,” Zeno urged.

  Comforted by his clear cognitive awareness, Sophia was thrilled to share her work with the man who had taught her so diligently, and for minutes uncounted the two heads remained close together, their impassioned voices reverberating through the empty fabbrica as the warmth of the furnace flames enveloped them.

  “You can see the genius of Galileo’s design.” Sophia lined the small pieces of curved glass up before them. “If you hold them up and gaze through them, they change what you see. With every change in curve and combination comes yet another change in the distortion.”

  They took turns peering through the lenses with one eye closed like patched pirates, looking at everything in the room, the walls and the floors, through the image-altering pieces Sophia had constructed.

  “Amazing,” Zeno whispered, shifting his luminous stare from the glass to his daughter. “You have done incredible work.”

  Sophia heard his voice quiver with emotion, with his pride. She basked in his beneficence.

  “Grazie, Papà.”

  Father and daughter embraced again, relishing the moment, all the more dear for the fleeting, intransient quality that permeated their close relationship; the darkness that, like the shadows, always followed behind the light.

  “Perhaps next year we will add another team. Perhaps Galileo’s device will be a great success and by next year we will need more workers.” Zeno gestured into the vast expanse of the factory.

  The torch flame flickered, the light dimmed, or was it just the gleam of the moment.

  “Don’t forget, father, by next year I will be married.” Sophia felt her face fall and her smile disappear.

  Signore Fucini had instructed the family to share everything with Zeno during his lucid hours, to keep nothing from him. Snippets of disjointed memory needed to match reality or the contrast might be too shocking.

  Zeno stared at his daughter, a furrow forming between his bushy brows, his wide mouth parting yet silent.

  “Remember, Papà?” Sophia put the small curved pieces back on the scarred and burnt table surface. “To Pasquale da Fuligna?”

  Zeno’s face splotched with color and his hands began to quiver. Sophia feared a change in his temperament was imminent, the kind that so often preceded a spell of delusion.

  Zeno leaned forward, putting his face within inches of his daughter’s. Sophia stared deep into his eyes and saw him there, the animation and intelligence she recognized and adored.

  “We never know what the future holds, Phie. With that man’s activities, perhaps jail awaits him or perhaps an even more terrible fate.”

  Sophia flinched. “What? What do you—”

  “Zeno? Zeno, are you in there?”

  Her mother’s worried cry flew in on the breeze from the open doorway, echoing off the courtyard’s stone, blaring through the family compound. Within seconds, a nightgown-clad Mamma stood in the doorway. Seeing her husband in the faint light of the burning furnace fires, Viviana’s shoulders slumped in relief, one hand stilled against her full bosom while the other wagged a chastising finger at her spouse.

  “Don’t do that again, Zeno. You cannot leave without telling me where you’re going. You scared me to death. Come back to bed now. You too, Sophia, to bed.” With a narrow-eyed stare and a huff of indignation for her two recalcitrant family members, Viviana stalked away.

  In silent obedience, Zeno turned from his daughter, heading for the stairs and the door at the top.

  “Papà?” Sophia took a step toward Zeno, but her father’s closed expression stifled any further conversation.

  Her questions would have to wait, but she would wait in fear, not knowing whether her father would be able to answer them when next she had the chance to ask.

  Fourteen

  “If I can find out what he is involved with,” Sophia finished relating the previous night’s strange occurrence to Damiana with a bang of her fist upon the barge railing, “and confirm it, unimpeachably, I can put a letter in the bocca di leone.” She narrowed her eyes against the glittering, pulsing reflections of the sun on the dancing lagoon as if she could discern the truth she sought in their sparkling depths.

  “But how can you find out? How can you be sure? You know how grave the consequences for any who put a false accusation into the Lion’s Mouth,” Damiana hissed into Sophia’s ear as they stood close together amidst a milling crowd.

  For years, anonymous allegations were put into the opening of the carved stone lion’s mouth, the receptacle the powerful Council of Ten used to keep informed of the city’s lawbreakers, but too many false indictments had been levied, too many people hungry for power or revenge had used scandal to further their own agendas.

  More such boxes were kept in cubbies around the city these days, grotesque open-mouthed harbingers of retribution, in churches and at the Doge’s Palace, both outside and in, but any denunciations fed to them must be signed. The Ten would ignore any nameless charges, taking action only after a thorough and confirming investigation.

  “I would never make a specious condemnation against anyone, no matter how tempting,” Sophia huffed with indignation, staring crossly at Damiana over her shoulder, “for honor’s sake, if not that of my family.”

  The girls stepped off the ferry and onto the Fondamenta Nuove and the mounting heat assaulted them like a rushing tide, a warmth foretelling summer’s impending scorch. The dazzling light of the gleaming orb high in the afternoon sky sent its burning rays down to earth, charring the hard pavement. The warmth of the stone seared their feet through their thin summer walking shoes.

  Damiana followed Sophia along the crowded quay, raising her voice over the cacophonous, milling crowd. Clucking chickens, wings flapping in agitation, chased pink-skinned, snorting pigs around the ankles of the teeming horde, adding their contribution to the raucous din.

  “But how could you ever be sure? Where would you find such indis
putable information?”

  Sophia stopped, waiting for her friend to catch up, scrunching her amethyst gauze-clad shoulders up to her ears.

  “Perhaps I could get the information from a servant. We have plenty of money and it’s done all the time. The right amount of ducats can smoothly turn a servant into a spy.”

  Sophia wondered if there were spies among La Spada’s workers and if they knew her secret. She’d noticed some of the newer craftsmen looking at her surreptitiously; she avoided their inquisitive looks whenever possible, though never once did she consider spending less time in the factory.

  “And what if they are true and loyal, like most? Do you not think they would tell their employer his future wife is trying to buy his secrets?”

  Sophia said nothing; she could not speak while her teeth ground together. Damiana spoke the truth, but such legitimacy only fanned the flames of Sophia’s frustration.

  “Did I tell you my brother is to become a gondolier?” Damiana saw her friend’s jaw pulse and latched onto the first distracting subject that came to mind. The friends turned west onto the Rio Terra de la Maddelena, heading toward one of the small but affluent parishes in the less-populated borough of Cannaregio.

  “Really?” Sophia raised her chin from her chest and her gaze from the ground. “Which brother?”

  “Martino.”

  Damiana pulled Sophia over to the right side of the lane, closer to the buildings, as a four-manned palanquin careened past, its wealthy inhabitant hidden behind the closed, shimmering gauze curtains.

  “Martino? Doesn’t he already have a job at the squero?”

  “Sì, but better to ride upon a boat than to build one, at least that’s what Martino says.” Damiana laughed at her brother’s laziness. “Of course I don’t know how he’ll refrain from snooping upon his patrons. He’s the worst sort of busybody. But they are trained to comport themselves with the utmost discretion.”